Binna Kandola, a business psychologist who specialises in racism and sexism, argues that offices are prone to a deep-seated racist culture. “There’s a racial hierarchy. It was developed during the course of the slave trade and it’s a hierarchy of human beings. And wherever I looked, whether it was Brazil or north America or Europe – [or] even South Africa where black people are the majority – the hierarchy is always the same. It’s white at the top, black at the bottom, and everybody else in between.

Such prejudices have clear economic consequences. The poverty rate for ethnic minorities is double that of white groups, according to research last year by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which also noted that workers who were not white were concentrated in low-paid sectors. And that was despite generally higher standards of academic attainment than most white groups.